Just Kids: They're just kids

The life story of singer Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

In 1967, twenty-one-year-old Patti Smith left home and went to New York to become an artist, or at least the mistress of an artist. She managed to do both, although the road to fame as a rock singer was long and thorny. The artist who became the man of her life was Robert Mapplethorpe, a talented artist and photographer. Patti Smith's memoir begins at a time when, far from being celebrities, they were "just kids" for whom art was everything.

Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, and Patti Smith had promised him shortly before that she would write a book about their intense and complicated lives. The result is one of the best things ever written in the field of rock memoirs.